Read Online Kilkenny 02 - A Man Called Trent (v5.0) by Louis L’Amour - Free Book Online Page A

trail led through a low place walled on each side by low, sandy hills, covered with mesquite, bunch grass, and occasional prickly pear. This job of saving Davis’s place for him was turning into something bigger than Lance Kilkenny had dreamed. It was becoming one of the biggest things he had ever walked into. One thing, at least—he had proved to himself that Steele and Lord were out of it. Now if he could bring them to peace with Mort Davis, the only thing left would be to fight it out with the mysterious boss of the gang.
    Somehow, more and more, he was beginning to feel that there was more behind this plan than he imagined. This didn’t seem like even a simple rustling scheme. Try as he might, he couldn’t fit any man into it who he knew. Nor any he had heard of. Yet the fact remained that the leader knew him. Gun experts were as much a part of the West as Indians or cows. It was not an accident that there were so many. And they were, good and bad, essential to the making of the West. Kilkenny was one of the few who saw hisown place in the scheme of things clearly. He knew just exactly what he meant, what he was.
    Billy the Kid, Pat Garrett, Wes Hardin, Hickok, Ben Thompson, Tom Smith, Earp, Masterson, Tilghman, John Selman, and all the rest were a phase. Most of them cleared out badmen, opened up the West. They fought Indians and they were the tough, outer bark of the pioneering movement. The West was a raw country, and raw men came to it, but there had to be peace. These men, lawless as many of them were, were also an evidence of the coming of law and order, for many of them became sheriffs or marshals, became men who made the West safer to live in.
    There could be an end to strife. It was not necessary to go on killing. It could be controlled, and one way to control it was to put the law in the hands of a strong man. Often he was himself a badman, and sometimes he killed the wrong man. But by and large, he kept many other gunmen from killing many more men, and brought some measure of order to the West. Yet this new outlaw leader, this mysterious man upon the cliff, this man who seemed to be pulling the strings from behind the scenes was not one of these. He was different, strange.
    Shadows grew longer as the sun sank behind the painted hills, and a light breeze came from the south, blowing up from Mexico. There was a faint smell of dust in the air. Kilkenny glanced at Gates.
    “Somebody fogged it along this trail not so long ago,” he said. “Somebody who wanted to get someplace in a hurry.”
    “Yeah.” Rusty nodded. “And that don’t mean anything good for us.”
    “Whoever the big mogul in this game is,” Kilkennysaid thoughtfully, “will try to break the trouble between Steele and Lord without delay.”
    “The worst of it is we don’t know what he’ll do, or where he’ll strike next,” Gates said.
    They were riding at a steady trot toward Botalla when they saw a rider winging it toward them. Rusty flagged him down.
    “Hey, what’s the rush?” he demanded.
    “All tarnation’s busted loose!” the rider shouted excitedly. “Lord’s hay was set afire, and Steele’s fence cut. Some of Lord’s boys had a runnin’ fight with two of Steele’s men, and in town there have been two gunfights!”
    “Anybody killed?” Kilkenny demanded anxiously.
    “Not yet. Two men wounded on Steele’s side!” The cowboy put spurs to his horse and raced off into the night toward the Steele Ranch.
    “Well, there goes your cattle war!” Rusty said. “This’ll make Lincoln County look like nothin’ at all! What do we do now?”
    “Stop it, that’s what.”
    Kilkenny whipped the buckskin around and in a minute they were racing down the road toward Botalla.
    The main street was empty and as still as death when they dashed up, but there were lights in the Spur, and more lights in the bigger Trail House. Kilkenny swung down, loosened his guns in their holsters, and walked through the batwing doors of the